Skylab's orbit was not that high -- roughly 270 miles -- in any case it was launched in 1973 and crashed to Earth only six years later, in 1979. The ISS's current altitude is 242 miles. I can't find any orbital data on Mir, but the space shuttle got there, too, and it didn't take more than a few years to crash back to Earth after maintenance ended.
Also note that if you orbit much higher you go into the lower fringes of the radiation belts. That's not a good place for people to be living for months.
According to an old textbook I remember, ISS (and Mir) are at about the altitude that's the best compromise between radiation exposure and atmospheric drag.
An even better one I remember was from a launch failure a few years ago. One of the launch vehicle's solid rocket engines detonated 11 seconds after liftoff, showering the area with burning hunks of aluminum and solid rocket fuel.
A report I read said the payload (a GPS satellite) survived the explosion intact, but was destroyed by "decelleration trauma".
That episode where the Enterprise crew helped some fuel farmers or something run off Klingon bullies, with absolutely no one getting hurt despite booby traps and phaser/disruptor fire? It was so limp. It was essentially 'bullies are bad'. Well, no shit.
Watching that episode felt like watching an episode of "The A Team".
And of course "Voyager" = "Gilligans Island", and the recent Enterprise "Canamar" episode = "Con Air".
No they weren't. The Orbiter is built largely from very normal aluminium. The thermal protection is provided by tiles. There are two types of tiles: black and white. Only the black ones can stand the full temperature of re-entry, and they are placed over the nose and flat bottom of the craft. The white tiles on the top and sides can only deal with the lesser temeratures that leak around.
I got to see Columbia 3 years ago when it was in Boeing's maintenance hangar in Palmdale, and this reminds me of an interesting fact I learned. According to the Boeing employee who was playing tour guide, the black tiles vs. white tiles is as you describe.
But only on Columbia. None of the other orbiters use white tiles, since they determined they can instead use much simpler fiberglass blankets.
(No, I don't remember the technical name for
those things.)
Wells Fargo's
online banking site has worked fine for me with
Opera and Mozilla, both on Linux and on my Mac.
The only problem I've ever had with it involved an
old version of Opera. I can't well describe what I
saw, but it apparently was just a bug in Opera that
was later fixed.
Are there similar studies with respect to heat about microprocessors?
I have a very old K6-2 based system with
an entire 3 gigabytes of hard disk. Already my apartment heats up too much, and the CPU fan is much louder than any of the disks in this study.
I want to slowly update components. I'll probably get one of the quietest disks, but what about microprocessor? I understand most are much hotter than my K6-2, and therefore I'd presume the CPU fans would make a hell of a racket.
(Mine already does). I'd like to minimize this.
My all-time favorite Star Trek villian is still
Reverend Jim the Klingon. I kept expecting him to say "You want the, uhhh, Genesis Device, Captain, uhhh, Kirk? Uhhhh, okee dokee!"
When I was at Defcon last year, one day my friend and I went out to
a nearby place for lunch.
When our waitress showed up, her clothes reminded me of the place Jennifer Aniston's character worked. I asked her if she had to wear 15 pieces of flair.
She apparently had no idea what I was talking about. I was so disappointed.:-)
I haven't upgraded my x86 system very much in recent years. In the past, my upgrade path was something like this:
386 to 486. For one reason, to play X-wing.
486 to Pentium and new video card. For one reason, to play Tie Fighter.
I haven't been into games much since then, and accordingly I haven't upgraded my system much. I still run a 300 MHz K6-2, and I still use the same video card I got to play Tie fighter. (3D accelleration? What's that?)
I have a very low bandwidth 'net connection. The only way I can browse the web is to turn off auto image loading, and then manually load images which look interesting and relevant. (Usually right-click, then select a "load image" menu item.)
I've done this in Mosaic, Netscape 1-4, and now Opera.
As far as I can tell there is no way to do this in Mozilla. On any platorm. Is there in fact a way to do this? Mozilla is useless to me without this feature.
Re:The right idea for the wrong place
on
Hawaii Wi-Fi
·
· Score: 1
try being in a car and riding down the road a few miles while on the phone, you often get disconnected
Hell, I have this problem standing in one place around here, the cellco's don't need any help from the hills/valleys.
Heh, I was just about to say the same thing. The most memorable occasions:
I was driving through one of the few remaining agricultural areas around here. I left the largest street in the area, and didn't make it more than 1/4 mile (going uphill, BTW) down the smaller street before I got SIGNAL FADED.
Another time I got the SIGNAL FADED while standing underneath one of the repeater towers...
By contrast, I once had a full strength signal while on a sailboat 5 miles out into the ocean; I thought that was well beyond PCS' range. Go figure.
Decades ago, I remember going through model houses at a new California suburbia then being built up. (Now known as Irvine.) In many of the houses there were hallways with music coming from the walls.
I had the impression they'd just stuck an ordinary, normally celing-mounted, speaker to the inside of the drywall somewhere. I never found out details, and I don't think it was a "standard feature" of the houses.
If they make a ton of these, what's that going to mean for our supply of Terfenol? I'm not an environmentalist or anything, but I'm sure people won't be happy.
I wonder if it might end up like tantalum. During the.com bubble, it was virtually impossible to get surface mountable tantalum capacitors, because so many were being used up by all the PeeCees and carphones being built.
Leadtimes for capacitors were upwards of a year for a while.
I even heard that some people in Malaysia (I think) discovered that tantalum could be found in the waste products of a particular type of old chemical plant. (I wish I remembered the details.) There were a lot of surreptitions mining operations where people were tunnelling underneath such sites, and collecting the contaminated soil to extract tantalum from.
Also, many electronics vendors were redesigning a lot of their voltage regulators so that they could be used without a capacitor on their output. (Standard design technique.)
Also, some electronics vendors started to release capacitors made with niobium instead of tantalum.
I don't know what's become of all that now.
Re:More DOS out there than you think
on
FreeDOS
·
· Score: 1
My employer is reviving an old product, which is a sophisticated industrial process controller based on a PeeCee.
The software was developed many years ago and
was refined over many years, and reportedly works very well. The current plan is to use the existing software exactly as is.
It was originally designed to run on DOS 3.3. I think (ICBW) it'll work on up to 6.22. I wonder where we're going to get legit copies of any of that any more.
I'll look into using FreeDOS. This isn't my area, I'm an electronics hardware designer, but I'm intrigued and I'd love to be able to promote open source.
Not if the advertisers now know for a fact that everybody fast-forwards through ads...
Maybe it would help get rid of the shitty ads. An example of the distinction:
I probably wouldn't avoid watching more of Britney.:-)
OTOH, when one of the commercials for Sit & Sleep (a local furniture retailer) comes on the radio, I turn the radio off as fast as possible. I think I've actually knocked the radio off the tabletop before, I was reaching for the power switch so fast. Yes, they're that obnoxious.
You are mixing up Mendocino, the city, with Mendocino, the county. I don't doubt that marijuana is cultivated (and smoked) in Mendocino, the city, but it is Mendocino county which is infamous for marijuana cultivation.
One of my friends who used to live near Sacramento told me that marajuana grows in the cracks in the sidewalk, it's so common. There and in neighboring Humbolt county.
That replaced M18. Just when I thought Debian finally got a modern version...
How to manually load images?
on
Netscape 6.2
·
· Score: 1
I downloaded a copy of Netscape 6.2 for MacOS.
(9.0)
At home I'm on a very low bandwidth connection (typically only 28.8k), so the only way I can use the web is to leave auto image loading turned off, and to manually load individual images if they look relevant.
I can't find any way to do this with Netscape 6.2. Is there a way? If there isn't, this program is useless.
Seriously, Emacs with it's old nickname "Eight Megabytes and Constantly Swapping" nowadays better might be called "Ten megabytes and constantly swapping", since we all have 64MB or more these days.
(correction made above)
It's probably still not enough. We went from calling it "Eight Megabytes and Constantly Swapping" to "Eighteen Megabytes and Constantly Swapping." I figure it's got to be up to "Eighty Megabytes and Constantly Swapping" by now.
For the most part, average people cannot control events or have any say in world issues. That same gut wrenching feeling people have after they saw Sept. 11th events is similar to the gut wrenching feeling I guess Friends' fans would have after they found out the show is ending. Just knowing people have died is no reason to get emotional and go flag waving. Americans are doing that because of the TV soap opera called "news."
Um, maybe we're doing that because 5,000 people in our biggest city, who as you've said had little or no say over events in the Middle East, were murdered for living in the USA. Thus we reacted as a nation, and why the hell not?
You won't find people rallying together to stop cigarette companies or automakers, even if the statistics are significantly higher than death from terrorism. Something about jetliners flying into enormous buildings going 100's of mph makes people more emotional than seeing someone puffing a cig. *Yawn* You mean I gotta wait 15 more years for this guy to die?
Deaths from cigarettes are a cost of people living their lives freely, as are deaths from vehicle accidents. Sept. 11 was an act of war. Big difference.
A clear example of this _is_ Sept. 11th. When everyone saw the WTC towers hit by the jets and then saw the Pentagon hit by a jet. Pentagon? *Yawn* Just a few hundred died. Lets switch back to watching the WTC action. When the 4th plane went into the ground at, um, where was that again? I don't know. Haven't heard anything else about it on the news.. (And don't tell me you didn't sense just a _little_ more importance in the WTC than the Pentagon attack.. I know I sure got the feeling that the Pentagon was "ho-hum" after watching NBC/CNN news).
Maybe it's because over 20 times as many people were killed at WTC? And before we found out how many people had escaped, we knew it could have been far worse than that. Also, the USA was clearly under attack, and the Pentagon is a military target; not that shocking that it would get hit in wartime.
Besides plenty of us listened to this on local radio stations. I didn't even see any of this until I got home from work that day, 10 hours afterwards. I'd already formed my thoughts by then. I didn't get talked into them by President Bush, TV pundits, or anyone other than friends, family, and co-workers.
Slashdot Mirror
According to an old textbook I remember, ISS (and Mir) are at about the altitude that's the best compromise between radiation exposure and atmospheric drag.
The power to destroy a planet is insignificant compared to the slashdot effect.
A report I read said the payload (a GPS satellite) survived the explosion intact, but was destroyed by "decelleration trauma".
In other words: crashing into the ground
And of course "Voyager" = "Gilligans Island", and the recent Enterprise "Canamar" episode = "Con Air".
But only on Columbia. None of the other orbiters use white tiles, since they determined they can instead use much simpler fiberglass blankets.
(No, I don't remember the technical name for those things.)
The only problem I've ever had with it involved an old version of Opera. I can't well describe what I saw, but it apparently was just a bug in Opera that was later fixed.
I have a very old K6-2 based system with an entire 3 gigabytes of hard disk. Already my apartment heats up too much, and the CPU fan is much louder than any of the disks in this study.
I want to slowly update components. I'll probably get one of the quietest disks, but what about microprocessor? I understand most are much hotter than my K6-2, and therefore I'd presume the CPU fans would make a hell of a racket. (Mine already does). I'd like to minimize this.
When our waitress showed up, her clothes reminded me of the place Jennifer Aniston's character worked. I asked her if she had to wear 15 pieces of flair.
She apparently had no idea what I was talking about. I was so disappointed. :-)
386 to 486. For one reason, to play X-wing.
486 to Pentium and new video card. For one reason, to play Tie Fighter.
I haven't been into games much since then, and accordingly I haven't upgraded my system much. I still run a 300 MHz K6-2, and I still use the same video card I got to play Tie fighter. (3D accelleration? What's that?)
I've done this in Mosaic, Netscape 1-4, and now Opera.
As far as I can tell there is no way to do this in Mozilla. On any platorm. Is there in fact a way to do this? Mozilla is useless to me without this feature.
I was driving through one of the few remaining agricultural areas around here. I left the largest street in the area, and didn't make it more than 1/4 mile (going uphill, BTW) down the smaller street before I got SIGNAL FADED.
Another time I got the SIGNAL FADED while standing underneath one of the repeater towers...
By contrast, I once had a full strength signal while on a sailboat 5 miles out into the ocean; I thought that was well beyond PCS' range. Go figure.
I had the impression they'd just stuck an ordinary, normally celing-mounted, speaker to the inside of the drywall somewhere. I never found out details, and I don't think it was a "standard feature" of the houses.
Leadtimes for capacitors were upwards of a year for a while.
I even heard that some people in Malaysia (I think) discovered that tantalum could be found in the waste products of a particular type of old chemical plant. (I wish I remembered the details.) There were a lot of surreptitions mining operations where people were tunnelling underneath such sites, and collecting the contaminated soil to extract tantalum from.
Also, many electronics vendors were redesigning a lot of their voltage regulators so that they could be used without a capacitor on their output. (Standard design technique.)
Also, some electronics vendors started to release capacitors made with niobium instead of tantalum.
I don't know what's become of all that now.
The software was developed many years ago and was refined over many years, and reportedly works very well. The current plan is to use the existing software exactly as is.
It was originally designed to run on DOS 3.3. I think (ICBW) it'll work on up to 6.22. I wonder where we're going to get legit copies of any of that any more.
I'll look into using FreeDOS. This isn't my area, I'm an electronics hardware designer, but I'm intrigued and I'd love to be able to promote open source.
I probably wouldn't avoid watching more of Britney. :-)
OTOH, when one of the commercials for Sit & Sleep (a local furniture retailer) comes on the radio, I turn the radio off as fast as possible. I think I've actually knocked the radio off the tabletop before, I was reaching for the power switch so fast. Yes, they're that obnoxious.
U.S. To Drop Charges Against Sklyarov
I'm also surprised it isn't slashdotted yet.
One of the last times I remember running Windoze on my machine was to try that out. Last year!
Linux forever.
Package: mozilla-browser
Priority: optional
Section: non-US
Installed-Size: 23956
Maintainer: Takuo KITAME <kitame@northeye.org>
Architecture: i386
Source: mozilla
Version: 2:0.9.5-5
That replaced M18. Just when I thought Debian finally got a modern version...
(9.0)
At home I'm on a very low bandwidth connection (typically only 28.8k), so the only way I can use the web is to leave auto image loading turned off, and to manually load individual images if they look relevant.
I can't find any way to do this with Netscape 6.2. Is there a way? If there isn't, this program is useless.
(correction made above)
It's probably still not enough. We went from calling it "Eight Megabytes and Constantly Swapping" to "Eighteen Megabytes and Constantly Swapping." I figure it's got to be up to "Eighty Megabytes and Constantly Swapping" by now.
Or is that Netscape? :-)
Besides plenty of us listened to this on local radio stations. I didn't even see any of this until I got home from work that day, 10 hours afterwards. I'd already formed my thoughts by then. I didn't get talked into them by President Bush, TV pundits, or anyone other than friends, family, and co-workers.